“We’ll see Charley’s children hoofing it, or riding broncos,” Uncle Hank said severely, “unless something’s did pretty quick.”
“You want me to rope for the carriage?” Apparently Shorty began to understand.
“I reckon you can wear your old hat another season,” Snake jeered.
Hank turned and sat down on the top step, and Hilda, afraid that he would see her, backed off into the friendly darkness where the talk came to her only in broken scraps. She could tell that they were planning the campaign. Shorty said he would catch up his crack roping pony, Pardner, and grain feed him; he would go over his rope and entire equipment, and be in training for the match from this day forth.
Of course he would. They always did practice for the contests, even when they were the best ropers in Lame Jones County—bar none. She wasn’t much interested in hearing them go over the names of those who, they were sure, would enter for the roping match. Shorty said Lee Romero was about the only one of the lot that he was much afraid of. Lee was with the Matador ranch this year, and known to be out after that carriage for them. In the dark Hilda smiled, all to herself. Lee was one of the Romero relatives of Maybelle and Fayte Marchbanks. Let him be out after the carriage for the Matador—Shorty would win it for the Three Sorrows. Bubbling with triumph, she slipped back to the house and up to her own room. She undressed without lighting her lamp. All that night the new carriage glided and sparkled through her dreams.
Two days later Miss Valeria and Burch came home. No word of the wonderful new enterprise that was afoot was said to Aunt Val—Hilda knew better than that—but on the first day, the instant breakfast was swallowed, Hilda had her little brother out at the asequia, a favorite play place, and told him all about the carriage they were going to have. It got Burch’s attention because it had wheels. He was almost as silent with other people as when he went away, but to Hilda, he talked a little when the subject interested him—short sentences, like a man. Now she pulled down the cottonwood limb that leaned low across the water, had him climb to his place on it, seated herself beside him and gently waggling and teetering the bough with a pushing foot against the ground, she declared:
“That’s the way the new carriage will ride, Burchie. And Uncle Hank said Shorty was to get it for us. Shorty has to do it if Uncle Hank says so.”
Burch, filled full of breakfast and happy confidence, voted a strong yes. The two childish voices rippled an accompaniment to the rippling water. A king’s coach of state would have appeared a modest vehicle beside the one Hilda described. She had no need to have seen it. The shining of her belief in Uncle Hank alone lent glitter to the varnish and softness to the cushions.
A dragon-fly flashed out from the other bank and hung above the water in all its burnished bravery, turning, wheeling, flickering, darting here and there, a dazzle of blue-black polish on body and wing. Hilda welcomed it as an illustration. She had all along been afraid that her eloquence alone might fall short of convincing the material-minded Burch. Here was something concrete, visible, with which to back up her assurances, and she cried out softly:
“It looks just like that, Burchie, only bigger. It’s as shiny as that, and it can go ’most as quick; but it’ll go the way Uncle Hank wants it to.”